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How a frightening hit led to a new career for Austin Collie

The seminal snapshot of a decade spent in football arrived Nov. 7, 2010, that day in Philadelphia when two defensive backs treated Austin Collie's 6-foot, 205-pound body like a crash test dummy. It was the Smack! Smack! of consecutive hits, then...

Indianapolis Colts wide receiver Austin Collie lies motionless on the ground after being hit in the second quarter of an NFL football game against the Jacksonville Jaguars in Indianapolis, Sunday, Dec. 19, 2010. Collie later walked off the field. (AP Photo/AJ Mast)

The seminal snapshot of a decade spent in football arrived Nov. 7, 2010, that day in Philadelphia when two defensive backs treated Austin Collie’s 6-foot, 205-pound body like a crash test dummy. It was the Smack! Smack! of consecutive hits, then it was silence, with Collie lying on the turf, unconscious for nearly 10 minutes, arms frozen like a corpse.

Peyton Manning knelt beside him and said a prayer while a stadium and a team and a fan base watching back home all wondered the exact same thing.

Is he ever going to get up? Is he ever going to play football again?

Austin Collie always got up, always wanted more football — after that first concussion, after a second one, after a third one. But that’s the thing. They just kept happening. Against the Eagles. The Jaguars. The Steelers. Soon, and whether he liked it or not (he didn’t), Collie became the face of concussions, just as the NFL finally began to acknowledge their severity but years before actor Will Smith was shouting “Tell de truth!” in a movie exposing their long-term effects and the league’s prolonged period of denial.

All the while, Collie went from versatile young receiver for the Indianapolis Colts — not to mention a personal favorite of Manning — to out of the league in five years and done with football by age 30. It was the game at its most cruel. Were his concussion history and the stigma that stained his name the reasons why?

Yes, he heard it, heard it over and over and over, the chorus of criticism that followed each big hit he sustained and the hush from the crowd that followed. Austin Collie needs to give up football. For his health. For his family.

“When you see stuff like that happen, that’s when you think, ‘Man, I probably should have been a teacher,’ ” was what Reggie Wayne said that day in Philadelphia.

“I can advise; I can’t tell him to stop,” Collie’s father, Scott, said later.

“I don’t enjoy people talking about me or tagging me to concussions,” Collie himself said in 2013 while training for an NFL comeback that never happened. “It doesn’t make me happy.”

He hated it. Lost in all of this was the science, science Collie studied and knew and leaned on heavily each time he decided to strap on his helmet and head back out on the field. Now he may very well make that science his life’s work. Collie is done with football — he retired from the Canadian Football League last week — and now is spending time at a facility in Provo, Utah, that treats the very brain injury that derailed his once-promising career with the Colts. CognitiveFX claims to be the most advanced concussion treatment center in the world.

The new age clinic boasts an impressive track record, but its results have not yet been verified and it remains a bit of an enigma in the medical world.

The ironic part is this: Even in retirement, Collie can’t shake concussions. At least now it’s of his own accord. Instead of sustaining them he’ll be researching them, studying them and, hopefully, educating athletes young and old, no matter the sport, about the injury’s misconceptions. First on his agenda: Set the record straight on the notion that an athlete who suffers a concussion can’t rehabilitate. Many think time is the only medicine.

“Wrong,” Collie says. “Just because you had a head injury, people assume you’re going to keep deteriorating, that dementia is right around the corner. Not true. What we’re doing is taking a proactive approach. We’re identifying the weaknesses in the brain and making those strengths.”

In a sense, Collie explains, the brain is like a muscle: Once injured, it can be rehabilitated. Collie knows. He’s lived it. He made his first stop at CognitiveFX after his first concussion — that scary one in Philadelphia — and that’s when his education began. He never returned to the field without full clearance from the doctors there, Dr. Alina Fong and Dr. Mark Allen, a pair of leading concussion experts. Ever since then, he’s been a regular patient, and even now he undergoes regular check-ups.

What Collie was doing at the clinic — healing his brain — runs parallel with what he did after he ruptured his patellar tendon in 2012, his last season with the Colts. He rehabbed it. And it works, he says. He caught five passes for 73 yards in two playoff games with the Patriots in 2013, his last in the NFL, before the team elected not to bring him back.

He spent one season with the BC Lions of the CFL, snagging 43 catches for 439 yards and seven touchdowns, before realizing it was time this spring. The drive was declining; that feeling he used to get on Sundays before he suited up with Manning and Wayne and Dallas Clark wasn’t there anymore. It was time to move away from football. It was time for something new.

So he’s dug in at CognitiveFX, poring through research and case studies in an effort to learn more about the head injury the NFL seemed to know very little about until the past few years. One advancement offered by the clinic: Instead of studying an injured brain with a simple MRI, CognitiveFX studies them with the use of an fNCI (functional NeuroCognitive Image), a more powerful diagnostic assessment that picks up on more subtle impairments. The clinic claims an fNCI scan provides more information about brain function in 24 minutes of patient testing than 6-10 hours of traditional testing.

“I’ve always had an interest in medicine,” says Collie, married and a father of three. “And hopefully that’s what my future holds.”

Collie's last season with the Colts came in 2012.

Among the focal points of his new gig is patient care. On top of working with high school athletes who suffer concussions, Collie recently recruited two of his old Colts teammates — Clark and Jeff Saturday — to the facility to undergo a week’s worth of concussion-related tests. The aim: Examine the effects of a decade-long NFL career on the brain.

“They’re two guys who are extremely bright and would understand the capabilities the therapy side of things can offer,” Collie explains. His objective isn’t limited to only NFL veterans. “If you’re an athlete who’s had a head injury before … and if you’re having that feeling that you’re just a little off, and something’s not right, come in and get it examined. Odds are you’re probably right."

Austin Collie knows more than most. He couldn't have sensed it at the time, but that scary hit in Philadelphia was the start of the end of his football career. It was also the start of a new career altogether.